Dumb Noob Q1 - Swapping over handlebars on roadbike

[Lozatron]

I recently bought a bike off ebay to be my commuter - it has better handlebars than my "best" bike (richey carbon ones) and I want to swap them over. As a hopeful but not very experienced amateur - is this a job I can undertake myself? I guess I'm going to need to buy two lots of handlebar tape, but apart from that, I guess it should be reasonably straightforward?

One bike has SRAM rival levers, the other Camagnolo Athena. Presumably they're both (a) reasonably easy to figure out and (b) fit on the same types of bars?

Any hints / tips / tricks gratefully received.

 

[amaferanga]

It's not a difficult job, but make sure you get the levers in the correct position on the drops before you tape them.

 

[Fattman]

I recently bought a bike off ebay to be my commuter - it has better handlebars than my "best" bike (richey carbon ones) and I want to swap them over. As a hopeful but not very experienced amateur - is this a job I can undertake myself? I guess I'm going to need to buy two lots of handlebar tape, but apart from that, I guess it should be reasonably straightforward?

One bike has SRAM rival levers, the other Camagnolo Athena. Presumably they're both (a) reasonably easy to figure out and (b) fit on the same types of bars?

Any hints / tips / tricks gratefully received.

I would suggest making sure your bar diameter where it is clamped by the stem is the same on both - this is not necessarily the case.

Also, and this might be an answer to your Question #2 re stems, the bit of the stem which clamps the steerer tube coming up from the forks may be a different height.

I hit both these issues when trying to install a new stem for Mrs Fattman, and pinching her original (rather nice) stem for my own use: the new stem did not fit her original handlebars (over-sized bar & standard clamp), the old stem when placed on my bike meant I had to source a 2.5mm spacer as it was that tiny bit 'fatter' top-to-bottom and I couldn't tighten up the headset properly. 30 minute job took a week (waiting for the replacement parts)!

In summary, though, yeah, it should be a job you can do, it's just a bit of a fiddle. I guess tape off, shifters off, un-clamp bars & remove, then all in reverse. No specific experience with the SRAM/Campag shifters though, sorry. Good luck!

 

[montage]

peel the bar tape off carefully if you can (the old stuff that is on there) and practise having a go on how to do the bar tape up nicely using the old stuff.

Otherwise it is easy:

1. remove bar tape
2. remove levers - this should be an allen key fixing...if it is anything like the shimano levers you pull back the rubber to reveal the bolt, google "remove sram shifter" or something
3. remove the front of the stem - should be 4 allen key bolts on the face, simply unscrew these
4. swap them over!